To the Quick

He opens the cage door. 'Come,' he says, bends, opens his arms. The dog wags his crippled rear, sniffs his face, licks his cheeks, his lips, his ears. He does nothing to stop it. 'Come.'

Bearing him in his arms like a lamb, he re-enters the surgery. 'I thought you would save him for another week,' says Bev Shaw. 'Are you giving him up?'

'Yes. I am giving him up.'

(Disgrace, J.M. Coetzee)

Whenever I come back after a year of not being there, I cease to exist -- on an earthly level, that is. Everything is everything else, and more, all at once; I dash from one end of the country to the other, tracing the lines of my family's movements around this area (diachronically and synchronically), dropping in on people and places carefully left behind, like the crumbs you leave behind in a forest so you can find your way back. I lose track of days and dates, I become fluid, stretchable like an elastic, I am suddenly shot beyond the farthest reaches of human capacity and am looking in from the outside.

So when I notice him huddled underneath the trunk of our parked car (all the dogs are always masculine in my head and my stories -- an interference from another language, but one that I don't care to correct), he is not just a dog, taking shelter from the stubbornly sweltering May sun. He is a visitor, a sign, a spirit, and I welcome him with good thoughts and a good smile. We are about half way up the Rtanj Mountain, where we always stop at the same motel for refreshments, on the way to my mother's native town further south-east, where centuries ago Romans built settlements at the eastern edges of their crumbling empire (and where one summer my brother and our cousin found a Roman coin, slightly bent, lying in a field of corn). At the Rtanj Motel, we usually have a hefty wedge of filo-pastry cheese pie with crunchy-brown outer layers and thick yogurt served in heavy wooden mugs with nicely curved handles. Someone always orders coffee, served with an icing-sugar-covered rectangle of rubbery Turkish delight, which is always, by some ancient unwritten laws, relegated to me as a treat. Depending on the time of year, we often find one or two swallow's nests built from caked mud and dried straws underneath the supporting beams of the outside terrace where we usually sit, with the swallow couple flitting in and out, worms dangling from their beaks.

This time the nest is empty and quiet, but then there's the unknown little dog underneath the car in the parking lot. I approach him carefully, and crouch down, speaking to him in some language I seem to use only for animals. That's when I notice that something is wrong with him. That vulnerable receptiveness I am temporarily inhabiting in a superhuman largeness created by my visit immediately ruffles up, ears pricked, antennas sent out tentatively, listening. Despite the bright and warm spring day with no wind descending from the mountain in front of us, there is a movement, an undercurrent, a whiff of something troubling, and it makes itself known when I realize the dog is affected by uncontrollable twitching of both legs on the left side. He's wagging his dusty tail and pushing his muzzle towards my outstretched hand, gently approaching my fingertips so I feel his moist breath, but he doesn't actually touch my hand. All the while, though, his left legs are twitching in short jerky motions which he doesn't seem to pay much attention to. Caught on the spot, I am disarmed by this suffering which the animal seems to be taking as its given lot (what else, really?); I search through our leftover food and give him a few pieces of a sandwich -- he eats a little, but leaves most of it. Then it's time to go; for some reason, I try to explain this to him, while he keeps wagging his tail. I run to the washroom at the back where something strange happens: as I am half-crouching above the toilet seat, all of a sudden I realize that I have somehow miscalculated the angle at which I should position myself above the toilet and that I am partly peeing on my pants. The moment I feel one strand of the flow trickling down the inside of my thigh, it is too late and I have to wait until I'm finished to assess the damage. Quite extensive, as it turns out; so much so that I need to change my underwear and my jeans -- awkwardly -- in the back of the car. When I'm done, I'm still a little confused by the accident and begin to wonder distantly if it maybe means something.

When I come back to the parking lot, the dog has left its spot underneath the car and has stationed himself a little to the side, as if he knows we are leaving. By now the day and the landscape have been tainted by that unarticulated something, a menace, a vague foreboding, and I am sensing heaviness in everything. I am not "giving up" this dog by any stretch of imagination -- he would first have to be mine, in order for me to give him up -- but it feels like I am. It feels like this dog is all the innocence and suffering and unrewarded goodness that I was lucky enough to run into, and I am leaving him behind.

Later, when we have arrived at my grandparents' house where my mother is waiting for us, I try to tell her about the dog as we are sitting in the sun-bathed yard, next to my grandparents' small vegetable patch, which they can't keep up on their own any more (just like they can't have chickens or a goat any more, and the shed is now full of cut wood instead). "Don't -- I don't want to know things like that. Please," my mother says in a voice which indicates she means it, and looks away, preventing any possibility of further discussion. Protecting her weak spot for animals, she thus leaves me on my own with the thought of the sick dog and the sinking feeling about that whole day, the feeling which settles in and refuses to leave me during the entire visit. As it soon turns out, this is my last summer with my mother, and in retrospect, the burden of that day marks already the beginning of that end.